Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 20, 2013

Google Keep, Now Available

Google Keep has been launched: it's Google's latest attempt to create a service for taking notes. Unlike Google Notebook, Keep is a Google Drive app (the Drive integration is not yet ready for public release), it doesn't have a rich-text editor and it's optimized for mobile.

There's an Android app and a desktop site. Both use the sticky notes metaphor and you can choose the color for each note, add text, images, lists and voice recordings that are automatically converted to text in the mobile app. Both interfaces let you choose between the grid view and the list view.

Google Keep lacks many of the features that were available in Google Notebook: labels, sorting, comments, multiple notebooks, rich-text editor, sharing. It looks like a lightweight Google Notebook for mobile devices.

"With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what's important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand," informs Google.

It's likely that each Google Keep note will be a file in Google Drive, so you'll be able to share it with other people, add it to a folder, download it etc.

For now, Google Keep is the only Google Drive service that has more features in the Android app than in the desktop interface.